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Fri, December 14, 2018 | 09:26

Opinion > Columnists > Donald Kirk >

Japan's militarist dreams

TOKYO - The overwhelming success of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the latest elections for members of the Japanese “Diet” - the peculiar word for Japan’s parliament or national assembly - portends hardening of tensions and priorities in Northeast Asia. Yes, Abe would dearly like to revise Japan’s post-war “peace constitution” whose Article 9 declares “land, sea and air force will never be maintained” and “belligerency of the state will not be recognized” (hence the term “self-defense forces” for Japan’s military establishment). In fact, one reason Abe called the snap election was to shore up ...

Donald Kirk | 2017-10-26 17:13

Showing off military might

The line-up of warplanes on display beside the runway at Seoul Air Base has got to be intimidating. The sight of the latest American F35s and F22s along with all those South Korean fighters may frighten anyone contemplating war on the Korean Peninsula. They’re parked near spacious exhibition halls where manufacturers from dozens of nations show off aircraft components, and entire planes and helicopters, for potential buyers from around the world.

Donald Kirk | 2017-10-19 17:22

Running with the nuclear football

Donald Trump at times engages in such flights of rhetorical fancy that a lot of people think he’s crazy or anyway unpredictable. How can you be sure of a president who talks about destroying North Korea, who holds out “the military option” - but professes to want to avoid conflict? There are two schools of thought about the Trumpster. Just about every college professor, like the columnists for the New York Times and Washington Post, thinks he’s unhinged and we’d better watch out, no telling what will happen. Then there are those who believe he’s crazy like a fox, that he may act and talk cra...

Donald Kirk | 2017-10-12 17:45

Declaring war and peace

North Korea has been crying wolf so often it's hard to get too excited by the "declaration of war" North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho made in New York this week.

Donald Kirk | 2017-09-28 17:34

Trump's war of words

It wasn’t exactly a declaration of war, but it did come close. What else to make of President Trump’s remark that the U.S. might “totally destroy North Korea”? It was one thing to belittle Kim Jong-un as “rocket man” but quite another to threaten annihilation of a country torn apart by U.S. warplanes in the first Korean War. If nothing else, Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly will be remembered as one of those classic moments at which a head of state spoke for shock effect to a more or less captive audience. His words were reminiscent of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1960 banging...

Donald Kirk | 2017-09-21 17:03

The art of compromise

President Moon Jae-in has to be a master of the art of compromise. He was all for the latest watered-down UN sanctions that cut down but don’t cut off the flow of oil from China and Russia to North Korea. The US would far prefer to see all the oil traffic ended, but the deal had to be the best anyone could hope for considering the foreign ministers of both China and Russia had told South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha they were not going to go for a deal that left North Korea with no oil. No telling exactly how the North would react to a total ban on oil imports, but it would be rec...

Donald Kirk | 2017-09-14 18:05

Hanging tough against N. Korea

Donald Trump doesn't get it. He warns South Korea about "appeasement," but who’s appeasing whom? Yes, President Moon Jae-in, hero of the candlelight protests that lofted him as the liberal darling into the presidency after the ouster of the conservative Park Geun-hye, would love to go down in history as the one who brought about reconciliation on this conflicted peninsula. No, that's not going to happen any time soon, much to the chagrin of some of the ideologues and idealists who were counting on him to say yes to just about anything North Korea wants. The North's sixth nuclear test shows M...

Donald Kirk | 2017-09-07 17:47

Advocating for 'peace'

One demand you don't hear South Korean leaders making whenever North Korea pops off another missile is, “Oh, let's sign a peace treaty, and everything will be okay.” That's partly because, if there's one party with whom North Korean strategists don't want to include in any such treaty, it's South Korea. They see the south - they spell it with a lowercase "s" - as not just a junior partner but a "lackey" of the U.S. They want to assert their superiority if not sovereignty as the only true Korean government with which the U.S. should be dealing in any "permanent" peace in place of the armistic...

Donald Kirk | 2017-08-31 18:15

Bombing the North with leaflets

Donald Trump’s notion of “fire and fury” for North Korea inspires cheers, fears and jeers. Is he threatening the biblical “fire and brimstone,” or does his rhetoric more closely resemble Shakespeare’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? Yes, there are those who think the American president is an idiot, but you also find some who admire him for getting Kim Jong-un to back down. Kim did call off ordering a missile to hit somewhere off Guam, didn’t he? That’s true enough _ though it’s not likely the fearless, “Respected” leader has given up on that idea while th...

Donald Kirk | 2017-08-24 17:53

Gesturing for peace

Small gestures would be so helpful in bringing about reconciliation with North Korea. Take, for instance, the cases of the three U.S. citizens still held in the North. They are all Korean-Americans, two of them former teachers at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, the other a businessman who once ran a trading company in the Rason special economic zone on the North’s far northeastern coast. Actually, freeing these three would be more than a small gesture but would be relatively minor compared to Kim Jong-un’s decision to pull back from the immediate threat of test-firing med...

Donald Kirk | 2017-08-17 16:28

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